Words and Light

Finally, finally, finally! It’s been a few weeks, but I’m finally done editing spring break roadtrip photos. I’ve pared everything down and have 122 photos to share with everyone.

For the most part, I’ll be posting/sharing them on a day-by-day basis, because dumping all 122 photos at once seems a little like overkill. Not every single one of those will be posted on this blog, but you can find each of them at my Flickr — specifically, within this photo set.

And now let’s start the journey.

• DAY 1 (Monday, March 23) —

At 5 a.m., Jeff and I arrived at the Tulsa Greyhound station, where Esten picked us up. We immediately began the journey from there.

Our first photo-taking venture was in Texola, Okla., where Esten had been before and knew of an interesting building we could photograph. An interesting building? Apparently it’s mentioned in a bunch of books about Route 66. It’s about two blocks from the highway.

We then sailed through Oklahoma and soon arrived in the Texas panhandle, which is home to…

THE BIG TEXAN. Which is home to the free 72-oz. steak. Which is free only if you eat it — as well as salad, rolls and a loaded baked potato — within an hour.

Everyone in Texas — and hell, a lot of non-Texans — know what The Big Texan is. I myself am Texan, born and raised. But I’d never stepped foot inside The Big Texan, much less eaten there. And now I’ve done both, and now I truly am a Texan.

We spent that night in Palo Duro Canyon State Park. Palo Duro Canyon is the second biggest canyon in the U.S., or so I’m told. But by the completion of this roadtrip, I was unconvinced of that bold claim. We saw some pretty big — and, dare I say, more magnificent — canyons later on in the week.

This is an HDR image, created from three bracketed images. Not entirely well done, but necessary because of the extreme shadows at sunset.

But Palo Duro was fine for our first day of touring the great American West, as well as our first night of camping.

Oh gosh. Our first night of camping. It was so windy. And canyon bottomlands can get quite chilly, as we found.

But the night sky was beautiful, at least for as long as we could bear the cold to watch and photograph it.

• COMING NEXT: A city in the sky in beautiful New Mexico